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Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

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Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#21

Post by tejasmanohar »

sealthedeal wrote: post #12

This reminds me of that robo company that you could text anything you wanted to and they would book/figure it out for you. Love that you are honing your focus in to Slack and Travel. Goodluck!

One of the founders here. Focus is a big component to why we think Carry can successfully scale in comparison to other ops-heavy businesses, like Fin (when it was an assistant-as-a-service) & Magic. We've done the conservative math, and the economics can work out without a ton of automation but obviously with a much lower margin than we'd like (and tech can also improve the UX significantly).

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#22

Post by llampx »

adtac wrote: post #7

Congrats on the launch guys, let's get bubble tea again sometime in the future :) I think I mentioned this before in person, but I'd like to repeat myself just so that others can chime in with whether they feel this pain point too: a lot of travel revolves around other travel arrangements (not necessarily flights) on the same day. These other arrangements are often slightly time-customisable too, but the number of co…

A European startup called Omio is doing this, at least partially. They used to be called Goeuro

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#23

Post by smcguinness »

cptaj wrote: post #15

Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.

Take a look at https://www.skyscanner.com. They have a "cheapest month" feature. All you have to do is choose your destination.

To see it, choose your flight then in the date pop-up choose Whole Month -> Cheapest Month.

I believe they also have the inverse where you can choose a month and a departure city and they'll give you destinations by price. I couldn't find it quickly though but I think they have it.

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#24

Post by thiagoc »

cptaj wrote: post #15

Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.

YES! I really want that too!

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#26

Post by koolba »

cptaj wrote: post #15

Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.

Google flights[1] kind of does this. If you put in an itinerary, add whatever other constraints you have (e.g. airline, flight times, fare class), and then click the calendar and wait a second, it'll eventually populate with prices under each day for changing the itinerary to that day. The cheapest day is colored in green so it jumps out.

It's not perfect, the calendar view shows two months at a time, and at times it's easier to use as starting point, but it's definitely better than clicking through 100 itineraries on an airlines slow site.

[1]: https://www.google.com/flights

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#27

Post by zip1234 »

smcguinness wrote: post #23
cptaj wrote: post #15

Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.

Take a look at https://www.skyscanner.com . They have a "cheapest month" feature. All you have to do is choose your destination. To see it, choose your flight then in the date pop-up choose Whole Month -> Cheapest Month. I believe they also have the inverse where you can choose a month and a departure city and they'll give you destinations by price. I couldn't find it quickly though but I think they have it.

While it doesn't work amazing everywhere, I love skycanner's map feature: Pick a month and destinations and prices shown on a map. https://www.skyscanner.com/cheap-flights-map

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#28

Post by kashishg »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Is your plan to continue to perform the travel booking directly? Or turn into a SaaS product (Slack, Teams Travel booking teams or companies) that any travel booking company can use? I'd love for our corporate travel provider to have this functionality, but we would never be able to support the use of a startup for our travel booking functionality.

We've been playing around with the SaaS idea that you described, because there are 80k+ travel agents in the US and they are underutilized! We eventually decided that performing the travel booking directly is important because that way we control the user experience, and our level of service is really the main value prop right now

We'd actually love to talk to your corporate travel provider and see if a partnership makes sense! ping me at kashish [at] carry [dot] travel? Otherwise we can get you started as an individual if your company allows it :)

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#30

Post by jbob2000 »

How will you scale?

The reason that travel booking is so bad is because once you get too big, you start to eat the (very thin) margins of everyone in the travel industry. Then they get all defensive and, if you don't get acquired, start cutting you off or giving you crappy restrictions.

Are you competing with something like Carlson-Wagonlit Travel?

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